Respected "60 Minutes" correspondent dies in car crash at age of 73
By Tom McElroy
NEW YORK (AP) --Longtime "60 Minutes" correspondent Bob Simon, who covered most major overseas conflicts and news stories since the late 1960s during a five-decade career in journalism, has died in a car crash. He was 73.
Simon was among a handful of elite journalists, a "reporter's reporter," according to his executive producer, whose assignments took him from the Vietnam War to the Oscar-nominated movie "Selma." He spent years doing foreign reporting for CBS News, particularly from the Middle East, where he was held captive for more than a month in Iraq two decades ago.
"Bob Simon was a giant of broadcast journalism, and a dear friend to everyone in the CBS News family," CBS News President David Rhodes said in a statement. "We are all shocked by this tragic, sudden loss."
A Lincoln Town Car in which Simon was a passenger Wednesday night hit another car stopped at a Manhattan traffic light and then slammed into metal barriers separating traffic lanes, police said. Simon and the Town Car's driver were taken to a hospital, where Simon was pronounced dead.
The Town Car driver suffered injuries to his legs and arms. The driver of the other car was uninjured. No arrests were made, said police, who continued to investigate the deadly accident.
"CBS Evening News" anchor Scott Pelley, his eyes red, announced the death in a special report.
"We have some sad news from within our CBS News family," Pelley said. "Our colleague Bob Simon was killed this evening."
"Vietnam is where he first began covering warfare, and he gave his firsthand reporting from virtually every major battlefield around the world since," Pelley said.
Simon had been contributing to "60 Minutes" on a regular basis since 1996. He also was a correspondent for "60 Minutes II."
He was preparing a report on the Ebola virus and the search for a cure for this Sunday's "60 Minutes" broadcast. He had been working on the project with his daughter, Tanya Simon, a producer with whom he collaborated on several stories.
Anderson Cooper, who does occasional stories for "60 Minutes," was near tears talking about Simon's death. He said that when Simon presented a story "you knew it was going to be something special."
"I dreamed of being, and still hope to be, a quarter of the writer that Bob Simon is and has been," the CNN anchor said. "Bob Simon was a legend, in my opinion."
Correspondent Steve Kroft said the entire "60 Minutes" team was shaken by Simon's death.
"He was a great writer, he was a wonderful colleague, he was a gutsy reporter, a true gentleman and really a stylish, old-school journalist who knew the Middle East as well as any reporter on the map," Kroft said Thursday.
"Nobody could replicate him. Nobody could do it his way," said "60 Minutes" correspondent Lara Logan. "He had that unique touch that people just loved."
Jeff Fager, executive producer of "60 Minutes," said in a statement, "It is such a tragedy made worse because we lost him in a car accident, a man who has escaped more difficult situations than almost any journalist in modern times. Bob was a reporter's reporter."
Simon joined CBS News in 1967 as a reporter and assignment editor, covering campus unrest and inner-city riots, CBS said. He also worked in CBS' Tel Aviv bureau from 1977 to 1981 and in Washington, D.C., as its Department of State correspondent.
Simon's career in war reporting began in Vietnam, and he was on one of the last helicopters out of Saigon when the U.S. withdrew in 1975. At the outset of the Gulf War in January 1991, Simon was captured by Iraqi forces near the Saudi-Kuwaiti border. CBS said he and three other members of CBS News' coverage team spent 40 days in Iraqi prisons, an experience Simon wrote about in his book "Forty Days." Simon returned to Baghdad in January 1993 to cover the American bombing of Iraq.
Simon won numerous awards, including his fourth Peabody and an Emmy for his story from Central Africa on the world's only all-black symphony in 2012. Another story about an orchestra in Paraguay, one whose poor members constructed their instruments from trash, won him his 27th Emmy, perhaps the most held by a journalist for field reporting, CBS said.
He also captured electronic journalism's highest honor, the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, for "Shame of Srebrenica," a "60 Minutes II" report on genocide during the Bosnian War.
Former CBS News executive Paul Friedman, who teaches broadcast writing at Quinnipiac University, said Simon was "one of the finest reporters and writers in the business."
"He, better than most, knew how to make pictures and words work together to tell a story, which is television news at its best," Friedman said.
Simon was born May 29, 1941, in the Bronx. He graduated from Brandeis University in 1962 with a degree in history. He is survived by his wife, his daughter and a grandson.
Google Opens Its Defense In Antitrust Case Alleging Monopoly Over Online Ad Technology
Google opened its defense against allegations that it holds an illegal monopoly on online advertising technology Friday with witness testimony saying the industry is vastly more complex and competitive than portrayed by the federal government.
"The industry has been exceptionally fluid over the last 18 years," said Scott Sheffer, a vice president for global partnerships at Google, the company's first witness at its antitrust trial in federal court in Alexandria.
The Justice Department and a coalition of states contend that Google built and maintained an illegal monopoly over the technology that facilitates the buying and selling of online ads seen by consumers.
Google counters that the government's case improperly focuses on a narrow type of online ads — essentially the rectangular ones that appear on the top and on the right-hand side of a webpage. In its opening statement, Google's lawyers said the Supreme Court has warned judges against taking action when dealing with rapidly emerging technology like what Sheffer described because of the risk of error or unintended consequences.
Google says defining the market so narrowly ignores the competition it faces from social media companies, Amazon, streaming TV providers and others who offer advertisers the means to reach online consumers.
Justice Department lawyers called witnesses to testify for two weeks before resting their case Friday afternoon, detailing the ways that automated ad exchanges conduct auctions in a matter of milliseconds to determine which ads are placed in front of which consumers and how much they cost.
The department contends the auctions are finessed in subtle ways that benefit Google to the exclusion of would-be competitors and in ways that prevent... Read More